John Bagford, Bookseller and Antiquary
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JOHN BAGFORD, BOOKSELLER AND ANTIQUARY MILTON MCC. GATCH JOHN BAGFORD (fig. i) was born in London, lived his sixty-five or sixty-six years there, and was buried in the city in May 1716.^ From at least 1686 until his death, he was at the centre of the London book trade, involved both in the dispersal of existing collections and the formation of a number of the great libraries. Among those he helped to build were three that became the backbones of two great public collections: the libraries of Robert Harley and Hans Sloane which, together with the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, became the core of the British Museum, and John Moore's hbrary, which King George I bought in 1714 and presented to the University Library in Cambridge. At least two nineteenth- century bibliophile historians believed that Bagford's own collections, known chiefly for their wealth of title-pages from early printed books, were created by ripping these pages from sound copies of the books to which they belonged; they heaped opprobrium on him as a 'wicked old Biblioclast' and 'the most hungry and rapacious' of book and print collectors.^ The student who encounters Bagford through his scrapbook collections of title-pages and other materials illustrative of the history of printing and bibliography^ will find him at first a risible and incongruous figure. His hand, spelling, and syntax all betray a lack of formal education and of talent for organization. Yet balanced scholarship in the present century has found Bagford to be a credible dealer and collector, despite his manifest shortcomings.* More important, perhaps, is the fact that Bagford's contemporaries—not only book collectors but also major antiquarian scholars—found him an impressively learned and industrious man who was, however, prevented by his lack of education from achieving his scholarly ambitions. The great Oxford scholar, Thomas Hearne, recorded approvingly that one of the major book collectors, Thomas Rawlinson, had drafted a Latin epitaph for Bagford that summed up the contemporary view of his character and achievement: it described him as a British antiquarian through and through, whose simple resourcefulness surpassed the painstaking diligence of others, ... a simple man and without pretence.^ Bagford has been known chiefly as the collector of materials on the history of printing, book production, and bibliography, which were intended to serve as the primary sources for a major work on the history of printing; most of them are now in the Harleian collection of the British Library. Yet evidence survives, largely in his own collection, to demonstrate 150 Fig. /. John Bagford. Engraving by George Vertue, after the portrait by Hugh Howard that Bagford was not simply a bookseller and the aspiring historian of printing but also a considerable antiquarian scholar who made contributions to, or observations on, a number of the major projects of the day. It is to be hoped that a book-length study of Bagford taking full advantage of the wealth of material that survives for bis biography will one day be produced. In the meantime, this paper attempts in briefer compass to sketch the nature of Bagford's achievement as a professional bibliophile and amateur antiquary. L BAGFORD AS AN ANTIQ^UARIAN BOOKDEALER Little is known of John Bagford's family and private life. The barest and yet most authentic outline of his birth, career, and death is provided by James Sotheby, who was with him shortly before his death, and reported to Thomas Hearne at Oxford: 'A little before his death Mr. Bagford told me be was 65 or 66, be could not say which, and I think born in Fetter-lane; and fiirst a shoe-maker at Turnstile, but that would not do; then a bookseller at the same place, and that as little; yet his genius and industry brought him to what you remember'.^ It is also known that Bagford's wife Elizabeth bore a son, John, in October 1675."^ Nothing more is known of Elizabeth, although it appears that the son was in 1713 a member of the Royal Navy; several of his letters to his father survive. ^ The elder John Bagford stated that he had been extensively engaged in the book trade since 1686.^ On the basis of his deathbed statement tbat he was 65 or 66 years old, it can therefore be assumed that his active involvement in the book trade began when he was in his mid-thirties. Almost our entire knowledge of Bagford is therefore as a professional bookman and amateur antiquary for slightly over thirty years at the turn of the century. The evidence for Bagford's professional activities is extensive, if hardly systematic. Tbere is a great deal of reflection on, and correspondence with him in the Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, the manuscripts of wbich are almost all in the Bodleian Library's Rawlinson collection. There is considerable correspondence in Bagford's own papers and in other collections. Exchanges with Sloane, for example, are preserved in British Library MSS. Sloane 1435, 4039, and 4040, and MS. Harl. 4966 is an album of correspondence received by Bagford. Many other letters to him (or copies of them) are scattered among the volumes of his collection in the Harleian manuscripts (e.g. MSS. Harl. 5096B, 5910 part iv) as sources for the history of printing. From these and other of his papers we learn much about Bagford's professional associations with a number of figures well known in London bookselling circles in the early eighteenth century, among them Christopher Bateman, John Murray, and John Bullord, who in the first years of the century moved from London to Amsterdam, where Bagford and others visited him.^° Harl. 5996, in the Department of Printed Books, is a scrapbook which contains advertisements for book sales and other materials having to do with the book trade. Many of the auctions for which announcements are preserved in this collection were held at Tom's Coffee House in Ludgate, which was also a frequent posting address for Bagford. However, the document which gives perhaps tbe greatest insight into Bagford's activities in the book trade is MS. Hari. 5998, for which the British Museum's eariy spine 152 title is *Bagford Book of Accounts' and which contains documents dating from 1702 to 1708. The importance of this volume was recognized by Fletcher,!^ but only recently has it been used in detail, by Dr Margaret Nickson of the British Library in her study of Bagford's dealings with Sloane, one of his major clients. ^^ MS. Had. 5998 contains a list of addresses of clients and associates (fols. 1^-2); a number of lists of books delivered to one Richard Tasell, a binder (fols. 4, 9^, etc.);^^ and some record of dealings with a copyist, who may have produced some of the more legible fair copies of Bagford's own writings in his albums (fol. 10^). Its primary contents, however, are lists of books delivered to clients. Among these clients are a number of persons whose connections with Bagford are already well known; John Moore, Bishop of Norwich at the time of these accounts and later of Ely; Harley, here often designated by his public office as *M^ Speaker' and 'M^ Secretary'; Dr Sloane; and Harley's librarian, Humfrey Wanley, who had known Bagford when he was at Oxford in the 1690s and continued to be a close friend and associate in London.^''" An impression of the kind of trade in which Bagford was involved may be gained from the record in MS. Harl. 5998 of his dealings with one particular client, Browne Willis (1682-1760), who is less well known to posterity, but who emerges as a major customer and a considerable collector. Willis, a Member of Parliament for Buckingham from 1705 to 1708, Hved at Whaddon Hall, near Fenny Stratford and Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, and was active as an antiquarian throughout his long life, specializing in the English cathedrals and the local history of Buckinghamshire.^^ Thomas Hearne visited him at Whaddon Hall—travelling on foot from Oxford^in 1716, and recorded that he saw 'only two old MSS.' but was impressed with the materials 'for the Antiquities of Bucks' and with the expense to which Willis had gone in assembling his collections, 'which much surpass my Expectation'. ^*^ At the time of Hearne's visit, Willis had just begun publication of one of his major works, Notitia Parliament aria: or^ an History of the Counties^ Cities^ and Boroughs in England and Wales . ., an account of the historical bases of representation in the House of Commons still of value. Willis was a minor star in the great galaxy of English eccentrics in the eighteenth century. The late Joan Evans has observed of his part in the re-founding of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717 that Willis had inherited from Bagford, who had been a member during the short-lived attempt by Wanley to re-establish the Elizabethan Society in 1707 8, the role of the 'eccentric of the Society'.^^ In MS. Harl. 5998, accounts for Willis bearing dates in 1704, 1705, and probably extending into 1706, appear at fols. 13-14, 18, 19, 20^, 21, 34, and 44^. Approximately 170 items are listed, and the total amount involved in these invoices seems to be a little over 3£i2—a seemingly small sum today, but not inconsiderable in the early eighteenth century, Willis may even have over-extended himself in his purchases from Bagford, for the latter made a note at fol. 21^ of an accounting on 13 March [1705?], when the sum of Willis's purchases was £10.